Antenna Wilde agree... I'd not even categorize us as intelligent... just mere conscious related beings would be enough... not intelligent... 100,000 years ago, the planet was beautiful, pristine... me messed it up... we are going extinct soon... no question about it.
Antenna Wilde Animals are violent to their preys, and possibly to their predators, but otherwise they get along pretty well. There's no reason to expect anything similar from aliens.
Antenna Wilde Well. I am of two options. First option, light speed can't be beaten. Design the most invasive of possible interstellar species, under that constraint... it's hard to be terrified of an immediate danger.
Second option, light speed can be beaten. In that case my summary belief is that "dark energy" is massive ambient pollution from alien FTL warp propulsion. The accelerating expansion of the universe becomes analogous to global warming, with warp drives substituting for combustion engines, and leaked quintessence for carbon dioxide.
Antenna Wilde The supernatural is definable as what appears to happen when a narrator describes as real what's in fact imagined in autonomy from the laws of nature. Of course the supernatural is always accessible, as it's always possible to deny, neglect or ignore any piece of evidence about the world to let imagination run free of it. Now, the evidence that light speed can't be exceeded is of the strongest sort, and no attempt to imagine beyond what we know, that would fail to contemplate as a likely possibility that lightspeed never is exceeded in the universe, can count as serious.
Now being serious applies also to attending to other possibilities. Over the century since the cosmic speed limit and the theoretical framework of it were established, physicists have come up with the shape that loopholes could take; these are contrived by an access they assume to huge amounts of something we've never observed, a mathematical fiction, negative mass-energy. Except for one thing, the mathematically comparable concept of dark energy -- which is the least mathematical fiction to add to the framework of general relativity to fit the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. OTOH, if FTL drive technology is permitted by nature and accessible to intelligent civilizations, this radically changes the rate at which a species can be expected to expand through the universe, and this makes it good hygiene to start from the large scale when trying to locate corroborating evidence in what we observe. Makes it funny you "would not comment" on my radical proposition, as it is quite hard to beat on the front of parsimony.
Antenna Wilde You are sure good as using buzzwords, less so with figures.>> " Some "random warp drive pollution" as you suggest would have to be so pervasive
// I spoke of ambient pollution, not "random"
>> as to necessitate believing that the entire universe has been mapped by alien spacecraft for millennium.
// millennia LOL. If you assume FTL possible you've to suspect some earlier civilizations achieved it and used it to multiply across the universe. Possibly until the activity damaged the conditions of possibility of it, like greenhouse gases make the use of combustion engines unsustainable. Do you know how many millennia fit into the age of the universe? 13500000 of them! Some civilization could have found it 5 billions years ago and exhausted the resource in a puny thousand of millenna, meanwhile spreading thin across the universe.
If "we" should include all who'd make us not feel "alone in the universe", then we are self-evidently alone in the universe.
ReplyDeleteAntenna Wilde agree... I'd not even categorize us as intelligent... just mere conscious related beings would be enough... not intelligent... 100,000 years ago, the planet was beautiful, pristine... me messed it up... we are going extinct soon... no question about it.
ReplyDeleteBut the later is most exciting...
ReplyDeleteOr, a Shrödinger quote : «Two possibilities exist at the same time : we are alone in the Universe and we are not. Until we open the box…»
ReplyDeleteChristopher Compagnon More likely until someone outside our universe opens the box!
ReplyDeleteAntenna Wilde Animals are violent to their preys, and possibly to their predators, but otherwise they get along pretty well. There's no reason to expect anything similar from aliens.
ReplyDeleteAntenna Wilde Well. I am of two options. First option, light speed can't be beaten. Design the most invasive of possible interstellar species, under that constraint... it's hard to be terrified of an immediate danger.
ReplyDeleteSecond option, light speed can be beaten. In that case my summary belief is that "dark energy" is massive ambient pollution from alien FTL warp propulsion. The accelerating expansion of the universe becomes analogous to global warming, with warp drives substituting for combustion engines, and leaked quintessence for carbon dioxide.
Antenna Wilde The supernatural is definable as what appears to happen when a narrator describes as real what's in fact imagined in autonomy from the laws of nature. Of course the supernatural is always accessible, as it's always possible to deny, neglect or ignore any piece of evidence about the world to let imagination run free of it. Now, the evidence that light speed can't be exceeded is of the strongest sort, and no attempt to imagine beyond what we know, that would fail to contemplate as a likely possibility that lightspeed never is exceeded in the universe, can count as serious.
ReplyDeleteNow being serious applies also to attending to other possibilities. Over the century since the cosmic speed limit and the theoretical framework of it were established, physicists have come up with the shape that loopholes could take; these are contrived by an access they assume to huge amounts of something we've never observed, a mathematical fiction, negative mass-energy. Except for one thing, the mathematically comparable concept of dark energy -- which is the least mathematical fiction to add to the framework of general relativity to fit the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. OTOH, if FTL drive technology is permitted by nature and accessible to intelligent civilizations, this radically changes the rate at which a species can be expected to expand through the universe, and this makes it good hygiene to start from the large scale when trying to locate corroborating evidence in what we observe. Makes it funny you "would not comment" on my radical proposition, as it is quite hard to beat on the front of parsimony.
Antenna Wilde You are sure good as using buzzwords, less so with figures.>> " Some "random warp drive pollution" as you suggest would have to be so pervasive
ReplyDelete// I spoke of ambient pollution, not "random"
>> as to necessitate believing that the entire universe has been mapped by alien spacecraft for millennium.
// millennia LOL. If you assume FTL possible you've to suspect some earlier civilizations achieved it and used it to multiply across the universe. Possibly until the activity damaged the conditions of possibility of it, like greenhouse gases make the use of combustion engines unsustainable. Do you know how many millennia fit into the age of the universe? 13500000 of them! Some civilization could have found it 5 billions years ago and exhausted the resource in a puny thousand of millenna, meanwhile spreading thin across the universe.
Antenna Wilde Merci, pareillement.
ReplyDelete